The Dark Materials

by Amanda Churi

  “You little liar!” Without giving me another chance to plead my case, the Haxor grabbed me around the throat with his electrified hand, holding my neck against the floor as I screamed in torment. It felt like my skin was melting off of my trachea, my bones burning and blood boiling with unbearable heat as the nerves in my body became petrified with power. I could not stop screaming, my body convulsing violently as I consumed all of the electricity that was offered.

  “Leave my sister alone!”

  “Get the boy!”

  My neck was released. My eyes spun, my ears ringing as I watched my brother struggle to pull the tarp off of him and push away the crates, several Haxors racing his way without hesitation and roughly taking hold of his frail body. I lie there, watching helplessly as they pulled him from the pile of items and forced him to stand up, one Haxor holding each of his thin arms. I couldn’t help but give him the most grateful yet ashamed look that I probably ever made. He could hear my pain, and in response, he put an end to it, but in turn, he sacrificed himself.

  My attacker hastily made his way over to my brother, yanking his arm out in front of him and opening his fingers. Derek did not bother to fight, his blind eyes staring ahead with a newly found determination that I had never seen in him.

  His own tattoo was revealed, and the Haxor slammed the bar into his palm, though Derek did not scream. He simply let out a sharp moan, holding his breath and forcing himself to stay strong.

  The Haxor pulled the bar away from my brother, looking at the shifting screen. “Derek Woodard,” the man grunted, giving a simple flick of the wrist to the two men who held my brother. “By the decree of the Proxez, you are hereby placed under arrest.”

  “What?!” I exclaimed. I tried to sit up, only to find that my body would not answer to such a demand for strength as my head uselessly fell back to the ground. “Under what terms?!”

  The two Haxors yanked my brother’s arms behind his back, squeezing them tightly as my brother gasped with pain. Lively strings of white electricity shot from the men’s silver gloves, the live currents wrapping around my brother’s wrists and binding them together so that he could not fight. Despite how strong my brother tried to act, I could see him beginning to lose his cool.

  “Under the new law issued by the Lord,” the man with the bar answered gruffly, “all minors under the age of thirteen years are now subject to experimentation and/or annihilation.”

  “Why?!”

  “Do not question the Lord!” the Haxor snapped, looking back in my direction as the spare men, who did not hold my brother captive, flanked him for support. “No child under thirteen shall be allowed to exist on the land. There is no need to continue feeding embodiments that are nothing but flaws.”

  “Then how do we survive?” I snapped. “How do we repopulate?”

  “That is none of your concern,” he continued harshly. “Anyone who breaks this rule—who bears or harbors a minor without the authorization of the Lord—shall be arrested and subject to termination.”

  I shook my head, a frail sob escaping my lips. This couldn’t be happening; they had always been unreasonable, but this was beyond absurd! “Please!” I cried desperately. “Don’t hurt him! He’s just a little boy!”

  “A little boy who will grow up to oppose us,” one of Derek’s apprehenders hissed bitterly. He turned his head to the Haxor in charge. “We shouldn’t be here any longer; we need to get back to the base and tally our captives.”

  “Agreed,” the man said. Placing the bar back at his side, he motioned to the door with his arm, walking towards it and stepping over my stunned body without a word. He did not look back as he left me lying there, walking through the doorway and into the bland, destroyed world.

  The other Haxors followed him without question, walking around me and refusing to acknowledge my presence. I continued to sob, my body trembling as the air escaped my mouth in wheezes.

  They left silently, Derek and his captives taking up the rear. Derek hung his head as he was led away; his legs were so weak from malnourishment that the Haxors practically had to carry him. “I’ll be alright, Flye,” he reassured me through his shaking voice as the Haxors passed me. “Don’t worry.”

  That was like asking me not to breathe. He was all I had left in my life; I couldn’t not worry about him.

  Taking a deep breath and trying to control my nerves, I said the only thing I could think of, hoping that he would understand. “Use those sharp eyes of yours!” I sobbed. “Use them and stay alive!”

  Even blind, as my brother was dragged out the door, he looked over his shoulder as he pinpointed my voice, his teary eyes stern, showing he knew what I meant. “I will!” he called back. “I will look at everything I can!”

  Tearing us apart, the last Haxor slammed the door behind him, my brother vanishing with them.

  The Haxors, and the group that they were a part of, the Proxez, had deprived the world of happiness, freedom, and life itself. They killed many, they imprisoned many more, and the ones left alive often wished that they would be the next to go in order to be spared the torture of living. It couldn’t continue; I wouldn’t let it. Everything I loved was gone, and I wasn’t about to submit to them ever again.

  “I’ll find you, Derek!” I screamed angrily, my shocked hands slowly regaining feeling as they traveled across the dirt floor, one stumbling upon the book I had been reading only minutes ago. I squeezed the corner, my heart tensing as I fell prey to the overwhelming curtain of sheer hatred that closed around me. “I’ll get you back even if I have to kill them all!”

  One

  Decimation

  Blackness—that was all I saw.

  I felt nothing. My mind was barren, ominous, unidentified whispers swarming inside my head and pulling on my brain, trying to drag me from wherever I had settled. I felt alone; the air was cold and choppy in this black void of space, and I was so distraught that I couldn’t even tell if I still had a body. I tried to move my arms and legs, but there was such an intense darkness clutching me that I couldn’t detect the slightest movement, leaving me to wonder if the unthinkable had happened.

  A million tiny, weak voices whispered to me at once. Their pitches ranged from the highest to the lowest, mixing together and bringing a painful headache upon me, adding to my already immense discomfort as I tried to decode the jumbled words of the unknown.

  He’s really here… one voice came through.

  Is he trustworthy, though? emerged another.

  Of course not! Never will he be! We can’t ever allow evil like him to enter our premises!

  I beg to differ! His heart is clear, as is his mind!

  Then you risk your being approaching the fiend because I will not!

  …Get a grip! I told myself as I tried to dismiss the arguing voices. You need to focus. You need to find out what’s going on!

  As soon as I processed what I told myself, my senses returned to me. My eyes flew open as the blackness faded to white, the darkness banished from my mind. I gasped with relief, hurriedly running my hands through my hair and across my body, checking to make sure I was in one piece.

  I stood in the middle of a white world, abandoned by every other color and presence—even the voices began to drown away into a mere whisper until, eventually, they were gone.

  I looked around, speechless. All that I could see for miles was a mist that flowed from the heavens to the floor in heavy layers, obscuring my view of anything that lay past the malevolent wall of clouds. Where was the world? Where were my friends? Where was anything?

  “H-Hello?” I called out weakly, my voice hoarse as I tried to speak.

  “Urg, what’s happening to us…?” an unknown voice came, their sound waves echoing in the emptiness that encased me.

  “I don’t know…”

  My heart jolted, recognizing the rough, raspy tone that I had known my whole life.

  “Dad!” I screamed happily, hardly believing my ears. Thinking of nothing else besides my father
who I had not seen in nearly half-a-year, I raced forward through the gas. The mist was cold, beads of water catching on my face and hair as I sprinted through nothingness. I swiped the air as I ran on, though everything looked the same and I wasn’t sure if I was making any progress; I could have been running in place for all I knew.

  “We couldn’t fight it forever,” my father’s voice echoed, seeming much closer than before. “We knew they would win in the end.”

  “Dad!” I cried desperately. “Hang on, I’m coming!”

  As the words left my mouth, I suddenly found myself in the real world. I dropped to my knees in surprise, looking over my shoulder in a panic. The world of vapor had disappeared. Earth replaced it… But in a way I had never seen. Looking back ahead of me, I warily stood up, unable to speak.

  I stood on the main street of Raddison. The merchant shacks and houses, which always stood so high and mighty despite the Nobles’ control, were now in shambles. Every house looked as though it had been abandoned for centuries; the wooden ones hardly stood on their foundations, broken, rotten, and the stone ones had crumbled and cracked, unable to fight the force of time that brought such ruin to my village.

  The sky was an icky gray. Dark black clouds passed through the atmosphere as a blur. The temperature was frigid; every breath I took created white puffs of mist around me. Not a living soul was in sight. An eerie breeze passed through the demolished town; a stray pair of wind chimes clanked against one another, casting a mysterious vibe over the land.

  This… This couldn’t have been my home. Everything looked so dark and lifeless. What on Earth had happened since I left?

  “Did you ever find out what became of your boy?” a man croaked weakly, followed by a bone-rattling cough.

  My head snapped in the direction of the voice, my sharp eyes catching a slight flutter of movement between the boards of a collapsed wooden house. Guardedly, I made my way over to the shattered home on the side of the street, firmly grabbing one of the wooden boards and hoisting myself up onto the wall, peering inside.

  Tainted light from the outside world streamed into the dark house through the broken walls and ceiling. A man I didn’t recognize lay on the floor, sprawled across the cracked tile. His cheek was smushed against the grout, his eyes drifting lazily across his dismembered home as his eyelids drooped, threatening to close at any given moment. His breaths were short and strained, his body twitching with each miserable quantity of frozen air that he inhaled. His clothes were tattered, and his hair looked as though it had not been brushed in months; on top of that, he was terribly malnourished.

  My father lay next to him, and I couldn’t hold back my horror. Upon processing the sight of him, I felt my veins ignite with fire, and I quickly pulled myself up high, climbing the wrecked wooden walls and making my way to the collapsed roof, finding a hole large enough for me to fit through. My blood pumped with so much urgency that I could hardly think; the only thing running through my brain was the frantic need to get over to my crippled father.

  I sat down on the sloping roof, slipping my legs through the hole and gripping the splintered edge tightly with my hands. I closed my eyes and threw my weight forward, sliding smoothly into the hole. I dropped about five feet until I hit the floor, the impact throwing up a wave of ash and soot.

  I looked up; my father was still lying there like a corpse. “Dad!” I screamed, running over to him and kneeling beside his nearly lifeless body. I trembled, my hands shaking as I tried to summon the courage to touch him. His long, curly hair was no more; parts of his scalp were bald, while others had small tufts of hair. He had lost so much weight that he was almost unrecognizable, the skin on his face stretched to the limit as it struggled to find the necessary means to cover his bones. His eyes hung, the once bright blue now replaced by a deathly gray. A trickle of blood came from his lip as he lie on his stomach, his weak eyes boring into the man next to him. He didn’t even seem to realize I was there—neither of them did.

  “No,” my father moaned painfully, clutching his withered stomach with his emaciated arms. “Madelyn and I tried to find him, but we never got anywhere, and when she vanished, I just stopped looking…”

  His companion nodded, grunting in discomfort as he tried to shift his weight and turn onto his side, only to find he couldn’t. “Well then, this is the end, isn’t it?” he whispered hopelessly.

  My father sighed. “I think so, Michael,” he griped, squeezing his eyes shut. “How did it come to this?”

  “The Nobles vanished, and we won,” Michael responded bitterly. “You tell me.”

  Gavin shook his head. “I don’t know; it’s like the Devil Himself decided to kill us all.”

  Michael gave a stiff nod of agreement before his eyes suddenly flew open, his body lurching back as a river of blood erupted from his mouth. I immediately got to my feet, staggering back with dread. The blood was not normal; it was black like tar, so thick that it covered the entire area around Michael’s immobile body.

  He continued to retch, the blood creeping across the floor as though it had a mind of its own. My father did not even flinch, his tired eyes staring at his friend blankly as he watched the life pour out of his body. “I’ll see you in a few, buddy,” he said quietly.

  Michael gave one last massive gag, a wave of blood stronger than any of the ones before it shooting from his mouth. As the stream of blood dissipated, his body heaved one last heavy shudder before his head slumped onto the ground, his eyelids permanently forced open.

  A mere second after his suffering came to an end, Michael began to vanish. I looked on in bewilderment, watching until he was eventually nothing but a discreet outline before a gust from an ominous presence arrived and took him into the air permanently.

  My respiratory rate increased as I turned to the blood that continued to spread hungrily around the room. The war against the Nobles had hardened me considerably as a person, but what I was face to face with scared me senseless.

  Hardly able to control my frantic emotions, I wobbled back over to my father, kneeling in the blood and shaking his puny waist. “Dad, come on!” I screamed desperately, my eyes burning. “It’s Eero! What’s happening?!”

  He didn’t answer me, only making my fear and anger stronger. It didn’t matter that we killed the Nobles—something terrible had happened!

  “Eero,” my father gagged, my arms freezing when he spoke my name. I could hear the gurgle in his throat, the small trickle of blood from his lip beginning to intensify.

  “I’m here, Dad,” I sobbed.

  I don’t think he heard me. His body shuddered, and, in an instant, he was contributing his own blood to the already accumulated amounts that coated the tile. I just held his side tightly, not knowing what else to do. I had just found my way back home after so long, and now, I was losing the last blood-linked family I had left. Whether we were close or not meant nothing; he still raised me.

  “I’m… Sorry…” my father rasped strenuously through his drowning insides. Weakly, I reached out to hold his fragile hand, gripping it firmly as my father’s last strand of life slipped through his fingers; it was the only thing that I could do to show him that he had long been forgiven.

  I only held his hand for a few seconds before the world around me pixelated. I watched the ground turn to squares of ever-changing colors when I felt my hold on my father loosen. I looked back towards him, my eyes widening with shock when I saw my father fading away just as Michael had. “No! Don’t leave me!”

  The world showed me no mercy. My father’s body disintegrated and vanished before anything else, his hand slipping from mine in the form of mist until my fingers collapsed on my palm with his absence.

  I was still, blanking out as the world fell apart around me.

  I was alone. My father was gone. My town was gone. My friends were gone.

  Everything… It was all gone.

  “Oh my God, please wake up!”

  I weakly looked up from the ground fading beneath me
, a sharp, invisible, and abrupt pain decking me so hard in the side of the face that my head spun.

  My eyes launched opened, a pair of large pupils and crimson irises staring at me. My aching heart immediately began to settle down upon processing her full cheeks and vibrant freckles, waves of happiness and warmth radiating from her smile and banishing the nightmares that overtook me. I was definitely alive; I could never imagine a face that beautiful.

  I made a mental note to myself to remember that cheesy thought; I knew it would get me out of an argument someday.

  She sat on top of my body, squealing with excitement when I came to. She threw her arms around my neck and squeezed my aching body as tight as she could, her brown hair falling over my face and blinding me.

  “Don’t scare me like that!” she screamed crossly as she punched my shoulder, trying to act angry.

  I chuckled awkwardly, a mix of relief and disbelief washing over me as I hugged her back. I didn’t know what I had just seen, but all that was real to me at that moment was her—her physical presence and her very large heart beating beneath her small body—well, that, plus my stinging cheek.

  “Did you slap me?” I asked with a forced chuckle.

  Mabel pulled away from me, quickly sitting up and fixing her hair, trying to look presentable. “Well—I mean, yeah!” she stammered. “I had to get you up somehow!”

  I breathed a sigh of alleviation. “That’s a relief,” I noted as I reassured myself that this was no illusion; I must have just hit my head or something.

  She smiled awkwardly, scrunching her shoulders up towards her neck and looking away. “Um…” she stuttered, her voice a bit higher than usual. “Well, you shouldn’t be relieved…”

  “Why?”

  “You should look away from your girlfriend and find out, idiot.”

  Good to know Laelia made it out alive, I guess.

  As much as I wanted to come back at her with a retort that would scar her ears, I held myself back, especially when I noticed that Mabel was unfazed by her insult towards me. Mabel held my gaze with her wide eyes, swallowing heavily before looking over her shoulder.